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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Monday, March 27, 2017

Too Sanguine About Sangin?

When I heard Sangin in southern Afghanistan had fallen so soon in the year before the traditional Taliban "spring offensive" season began, my heart sank. My how the good war has fallen. But maybe things aren't that bad.

"It is a complete fabrication," Navy Capt. William Salvin, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Kabul, told Military Times on Thursday. "This move has been in the planning for months. ... There is nothing left in the old district center except dirt and rubble." ...

Sangin's loss, [Dr. Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert with the Center on International Cooperation at New York University] contends, would be merely “a temporary tactical matter that affects morale.” There is little significance to either side in the battlefield moving a mile south, he added. It offers no clear military advantage. If there's to be reconciliation, Rubin said, it must be achieved politically.

Maybe. But it is still a retreat and a loss of territory that was once defended.

So the line troops were getting hammered without being able to take the initiative; and the special forces were being depleted trying to bolster the line troops rather than taking the fight to the enemy.

Our plan was to reduce the exposed outposts--like Sangin--to build up a mobile reserve capable of both reacting to enemy assaults to defeat them and to conduct offensive operations.

That capacity would reduce the burden on the Afghan special forces to function as elite infantry.

Add in more routine help from American air power rather than largely limiting it to hitting al Qaeda and ISIL.

So a retreat from Sangin is part of the plan to beat the Taliban.

The problem is that taking Sangin is part of the Taliban's plan to beat the government.

Will the government's loss of Sangin be part of a successful plan that hammers the Taliban and sees the government go on offense to atomize and defeat the Taliban?

Or will the loss of Sangin just be the start of Taliban territorial gains against the government that will break the morale of government forces? A long journey begins with the first mile, eh?

At some point, you have to control the territory to win. And I don't think reconciliation is anything we should be counting on to avoid a battlefield decision.

Afghanistan wants to double the number of its elite soldiers trained to block attacks from Taliban fighters and other militants. Defense officials said they would increase the number of elite special forces stationed throughout the nation to counter growing incidents of terrorism and violence, Reuters exclusively reported Thursday.

Doubling the force will no doubt dilute the quality.

Relying on the best troops to fight the enemy when that won't bring up the quality of the vast majority who are not up to the task seems like madness to me when the expansion of the special forces will not maintain quality if done in any time frame to have a hope of affecting the coming campaign season.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!